1. I'm also unsure about Final Embrace as the weapon pick. It doesn't synergize with Fire & Spark. This choice would only make sense if you're Borrised to the point that the higher base matters more than the 40% difference in the elemental bonuses (and possibly the Tremor/Fire Bash multiplier).

2. Onslaught is more of a movement skill than a damage skill. As soon as you land, you should be switching to Emberquake. So Onslaught doesn't really need more than 1 point, unless you just have nowhere to put them. More points maybe if you really value the debuffs... Or maybe rank 5 since the tier bonus makes it slightly cheaper than rank1.

3. I'm some 80% sure that Coup de Grace only triggers off normal attacks, so it's useless in an Emberquake build.

4. Bulwark is pretty worthless if you farm Limoanies and top-end gear for 75% ALL DR. For players who don't do that, Bulwark is worth points.

7. Charge **** alone might not generate charge fast enough for Forcefield, especially against bosses -- which is where you need it most. Consider adding Dynamo Field. (This also gives you the closest thing in TL2 to an on-command self-heal: Dynamo Field -> Forcefield -> Charge Reconstitution.)

8. To the extent that you have any points left over (or are willing to steal them from elsewhere), consider Tremor or (maxed) Fire Bash. The additional damage taken debuff from these skills is one of the few damage bonuses that multiply (rather than add) with other buffs, so they can add a lot of damage to Emberquake. Tremor is a lot more convenient. Fire Bash probably adds more damage for most realistic setups. (Don't steal points from Heavy Lifting since faster attack speed behaves like another multiplicative damage bonus when using a WDPS skill.)

1. You would of course enchant the weapon with fire or electric damage, but the higher base plus Glacial Spike procs definitely win out with Emberquake.

2. Onslaught is more for the debuff, and dumping the extra points there gives it a good enough duration that you should only need to use it once. Slow is the second best debuff in the game, only slightly behind Blindness.

3. Really? I've heard the opposite every time. Granted it's difficult to tell whether it's even going off once you hit a certain damage threshold.

4. Since he asked for an elite capable build I would assume Limoany/Grell farming is taking place. Any points used in Bulwark would be respecced at the earliest opportunity.

5. I feel it's too fundamentally flawed. Get hit now so you maybe won't get hit later? Pass.

6. Healbot handles that admirably.

7. This is more a playstyle choice of passive charge building vs another active skill to manage. While it's true that Charge **** doesn't help if the boss has no minions around, that also reduces the efficacy of Dynamo Field. It would require several castings to fill up your charge if you're only hitting the boss with it. In my experience, coming into the boss with a full strength Forcefield and spamming a few Emberquakes tends to drop the boss before it drops your shields.

8. Fire Bash requires a shield, which I guess you could keep on switch if you felt a need, but Emberquake is already so powerful it would only prolong the fight in most cases. Tremor is alright but most of the damage from an Emberquake build will not be physical, so again I don't feel it's worth the time.

1. You would of course enchant the weapon with fire or electric damage, but the higher base plus Glacial Spike procs definitely win out with Emberquake.

The doesn't matter. You'd be fire enchanting and Vellinque socketing any weapon, so that postion of the damage is an invariant that drops out of the equation.

What you're really looking at is the higher base (and glacial spikes) versus an additional 40% bonus if you picked something with a fire/elec component. Making that comparison requires making assumptions about the other damage bonuses in play. There's a huge range there -- a reasonable guess about stats for someone who console spawns gold and Borris and goes for 3x powerful enchants on every item is going to be off by maybe 10x for another person who enchants what they've got when they find Borris to the extent their cash on hand allows. Without doing the math, I suspect Final Embrace is probably the best 2H hammer at the top of that range, but probably not at the bottom.

2. Onslaught is more for the debuff, and dumping the extra points there gives it a good enough duration that you should only need to use it once. Slow is the second best debuff in the game, only slightly behind Blindness.

I don't really see a need for it above and beyond the 15 you've already got in copter. But if you love the slow that much, keep it. It's not an unreasonable choice.

3. Really? I've heard the opposite every time. Granted it's difficult to tell whether it's even going off once you hit a certain damage threshold.

This prompted me to go test it. I was wrong. I could get it to proc off flame hammer.
(This is an unexpected result since it means that the nomenclature for the various "cast skill on..." effects is inconsistent.)

5. I feel it's too fundamentally flawed. Get hit now so you maybe won't get hit later? Pass.

I think it's worth 1 point for the occasional save. Definitely not any more. "It's worth zero points" is also a reasonable view.

(Aside: There's a really fiddly trick for getting aegis "underneath" forcefield so that it only takes damage if forcefield drops. The hassle is only worth it for really paranoid **** players, but it's there: 1. Activate forcefield. 2. Deliberately stand in a fire (which bypasses forcefield) until aegis triggers. 3. Continually recast forcefield before it expires (preserves forcefield's priority as the first shield buffer to deplete). Aegis will last forever and never lose any points until forcefield drops.)

6. Healbot handles that admirably.

Right. Forgot about him. Charge constitution should be a 1-point wonder then.

7. This is more a playstyle choice of passive charge building vs another active skill to manage. While it's true that Charge **** doesn't help if the boss has no minions around, that also reduces the efficacy of Dynamo Field. It would require several castings to fill up your charge if you're only hitting the boss with it. In my experience, coming into the boss with a full strength Forcefield and spamming a few Emberquakes tends to drop the boss before it drops your shields.

It's assumed that you'll always charge the boss with the best charged forcefield you can muster and spam as much emberquake as you can. The question is what happens when the boss doesn't die before your forcefield gives out. (And even in non-boss situations, there's going to be times when the PRNG simply doesn't like you and charge **** doesn't trigger before your forcefield fails.) Your only practical choices are to fight on with a no-charge forcefield or to spam dynamo field. Yes, it takes multiple casts, if there's no minions to exploit, but it casts very fast. It seems like a no-brainer to give this skill 1 point, plus any spares floating around at the end of the day.

8. Fire Bash requires a shield, which I guess you could keep on switch if you felt a need, but Emberquake is already so powerful it would only prolong the fight in most cases.

Right, I forgot OP asked for a 2H hammer build. Fire Bash is right out.

Tremor is alright but most of the damage from an Emberquake build will not be physical, so again I don't feel it's worth the time.

After Vellinque skulls, nearly half of Final Embrace's base damage will be physical. As you head further and further into Borris-land, the proportion of emberquake's damage coming from critical hits on the weapon component increasingly predominates over the rest. The only reason not to soften things up with tremor would be that you're so Borrised that you're killing everything in less than 3-4 casts of emberquake -- in which case the cast time is better spent on one more cast of emberquake.

Actually for Emberquake you should socket either critical chance or Eyes of Aleera for additional Glacial Spikes. Every fissure can proc the Spikes, and the Spikes can even proc themselves again, so you can get a nice chain going.

As for the Fire & Spark, the only other 105 hammer deals purely physical damage, so it's no better in that regard. I originally used the Netherrealm Staff on my engineer because I believed the purely fire and electric damage it dealt would trump anything else, but after switching to Final Embrace I immediately shattered my previous damage record. The results speak for themselves ingame.

Onslaught slow stacks with Copter slow to really cripple the opponent. Plus it gets you immediately into range while bypassing any attack they might throw at you. It's simply the best way to start a fight. It's not that it's "neccessary" but rather there's nothing else as useful to do with the leftovers. If you absolutely had to get rid of anything, I'd say remove Coup de Grace, since bosses don't really get stunned.

Like I said, I understand the mechanics of each and simply made a choice of playstyle. Even a max level Dynamo Field would take you 11 casts for a full charge vs a single opponent. If you can live that long without your Forcefield then you don't need to worry about charging it up to begin with.

Vellinque skulls are great, but not optimal for Emberquake. The skill is ideal for proc'ing spells, even moreso when they chain on themselves. It doesn't take anywhere near perfect stats to see the difference. Vellinque skulls are also not as good when used in a very slow weapon such as a greathammer.

Glacial Spike can't proc itself. It doesn't deal weapon-based damage. Anywho, it sounds like you're venturing off towards a pure focus spell-trigger build. That's fine, but it's not a general-purpose Engineer build. You either have that one hammer to make the build work, or you don't.

You can watch it happen ingame. The math has been done on the Engineer subforum, and the best results for Emberquake (and similar skills like Wolfpack) are achieved with: enough str for max crit damage, enough dex for a reasonable crit chance, and as much focus as you can manage, plus spell triggers. You don't need that specific hammer - anything can be socketed with Aleera's Eyes - it just happens to be the best out of the limited set of legendary greathammers. If you ventured beyond 2handers, the most damaging setup is actually dual wielding Hammers of Retribution, but the Final Embrace is more than enough to get the job done.

I hope this will convince you otherwise. Here is a mod which contains a clone of Final Embrace that you can console spawn via the console name "test_hammer." I've altered the clone to have level and stat requirements of 1 and a 100% chance to cast glacial spike. Go try it. If it were true that glacial spike could proc itself, then a single normal hit against the practice dummy would cause an infinite loop of glacial spike proccing itself over and over. That doesn't happen. You can see quite clearly that it fires once per hit (possibly less often because of the 50ms cooldown).

Aside: While modding, I have accidentally made skills that do proc themselves and generate an infinite loop. So far, the result every time has been that TL2 crashes pretty much instantly.

What you're probably seeing is another emberquake missile finding its way over to the same target at around the same time that the glacial spike particles are playing -- so it creates that optical illusion that one glacial spike caused another.

I believe Glacial spikes can proc itself. Maybe this chance is somehow capped and can't be 100% but that's the only possible explanation how can Berserkers deal over 10 million damage with Wolfpack. Same with trigger-build Outlander. If you disagree, show me the math formula explaining that.

The Final Embrace is the best hammer for engineer using FINAL BUILD (the one Geist posted). Optimal final build /= optimal leveling build tho. You two were talking about different things. This all depends on if OP wants to do things the legit way or if he wants to respec during game, use mods for enchanting etc.
As i said, The Final Embrace is the best hammer but not the best weapon. Glyphforge is. High proc chance and 15% cast speed bonus make fights against bosses about 12% faster than with any other weapon (not counting dual-wielding Hammer of Retribution).

I was addressing the original post, which specifically asked for a legendary hammer. No part of this build requires respec or modded enchanting.

As nice as that cast speed bonus is on Glyphforge, Lightning is a somewhat inferior spell to Glacial Spike. I've tested dual Hammers of Retribution vs dual Arcgap's Vice and the Glacial Spikes still win even with reduced chance to proc. Emberquake also has a slight cooldown, so cast speed doesn't actually help you there.

I don't really know how to react on that because i agree with most of the things you've said. But ok...

I know OP was asking specifially for hammer, i mentioned sword because it's simply better (in case he is interested in the best 2H weapon). And Glyphforge is the best 2H weapon, if you don't believe that, grab stopwatch, open combat log and go test it against punchbag, bosses in TT or whatever. But as i already said, it's the best only if i don't count dual-wielding Hammer of Retribution because HoR simply too strong and easily the best weapon in the game. Still, OP was asking for 2H build so i don't know how does that matter.

About builds...your build is example how great final build should look but it doesn't mean it's effective for leveling. In fact it's not. I know because i was using exactly the same build without respecing, and running through the elite only autoattacking enemies, waiting for lvl 42 to get the one and only dmg spell is kinda frustrating. If you do this, you are doing things the hard way on purpose. Some skills that Chthon suggested would make leveling really easier but they are worthless in late game on the other hand. That's why i said you are comparing different things - one build is good for late game and one for leveling. And the possibility to respec or to get powerful enchants definitelly makes the difference in which skills to chose during game.

Thunder does significantly less damage than Glacial Spike. Lightning will proc about 3 times as often as Glacial Spike, but since Lightning does not scale with player level like the others, the Lightning and Thunder combo will not keep pace with Glacial Spikes. The cast speed bonus does not increase the frequency of your EQs either, so in what way is Glyphforge best?

Of course you can use respec to your advantage, but it's not required and I leave it up to the individual to decide if they wish to do so. I even mentioned using Flame Hammer instead if the long wait time for Emberquake was problematic. Getting "powerful enchants" is not really terribly hard to do. You don't need godly stats to make this or any other build work. If someone wants to use a mod to waste less time on it, I fully understand, but to imply that the build requires a mod is nonsense.

Meh. :roll: I have never implied that you need mods to make this build work. I don't know how to say what i've already said more clearly so i will let it go...

I know the numbers and i know Glacial spike is the best. But i tested it in the game and you can take down Punchbag about 10 seconds faster than when using Final Embrace, Mortal Edge, Foe's Collapse or any other 2H weapon (same results are against classic monsters/bosses - tested in Taroch's Tomb). If you have different results, the difference must be in stats allocation or in gems we are using (i am not using The Eye of Aleera because i already have two HoR on second weapon slot).

But i tested it in the game and you can take down Punchbag about 10 seconds faster than when using Final Embrace, Mortal Edge, Foe's Collapse or any other 2H weapon (same results are against classic monsters/bosses - tested in Taroch's Tomb). If you have different results, the difference must be in stats allocation or in gems we are using.

It could happen if you concentrated only on STR and the weapon DPS, but you'd be ignoring a large portion of Emberquake's damage from the fire component, and a lack of Focus would also weaken the Thunder procs.

All weapons have 350+ fire damage enchant, 30+ physical damage enchant and Vellinque skulls. I have tried different variations of gems - Vastok skulls don't increase weapon DPS, Rambren skulls are pointless because of strength and Whorlbarb are not that effective (for this build). Aleeras are the best but i am not using them on purpose.

Emberquake can't be cast more than once per second, so it would be more accurate to simply count the number of castings needed to kill the Punchbag. I went ahead and tested three weapons with identical enchants (fire damage and 10% crit damage).

So it's like I said, Vellinques are not optimal for Emberquake, and Whorlbarbs are at least as effective as Eyes of Aleera. Glyphforge was not the best weapon in any case, but neither was it the worst in every case.

I tested it again with the same method as you (counting emberquakes) against lvl 99 punchbag and on normal difficulty. Each weapon ten times with each gem type. I have the exact numbers in excel on another PC but i remember the results:

Glyphforge and The Final Embrace have the same results and are the best. Foe's Collapse and Mortal Edge are comparable and are a little bit worse than the first two. Ribcleave (5th) and Quietus (6th) are way worse so i tested them only with Vellinques. These results are the same for each category (with one exception - Mortal Edge with 3 Aleeras is for some reason as good as Glyphforge and The Final Embrace with Aleeras).

And now the categories: Eyes of Aleera are about 19% better than Vellinque skulls and Whorlbarb skulls are about 25% better than Vellinque skulls. You were right in this. I have probably mistook my engineers (i have five of them with different setups). It's actually logical to get more crit chance if you have high crit bonus damage. I have also tried to realocate 220 points from focus to dexterity to max crit chance but the results are the very same.

Conclusion: The best sword (Glyphforge) and the best hammer (The Final Embrace) are very similar. Weapon with faster attack speed (sword) would be better if you want/need to autoattack e.g. if you want to get charge before/during boss fight for forcefield, against atypical monsters like King Tar or if you are on low mana (this shouldn't happen). On the other hand hammer looks cooler so i would probably go for it, because to be honest it's the main reason why to use 2H weapon.

P.S. I have tested dual-wielding Hammer of Retribution, each with 2 Eyes of Aleera and focus enchants and i needed about 60% less emberquakes than with the best 2H weapon. Incredibly OP.

P.P.S. I have not tested polearms at all so i have no idea if they are worth it.

Yeah, as far as I can tell in GUTS, the fire portion of Emberquake receives full crit chance inheritance, but unfortunately the combatlog doesn't give the details needed to confirm this. This is partly why the weapon DPS portion gets overshadowed.

How is foes collapse for a 2 handed build? Also ember quake would pretty much only be used with quietus right? ALSO what do you guys recommend, 2h build or 1h and shield build and why? Also what gear? Mondons? Sorry for all the questions.

Foe's Collapse isn't the best ever but it's still pretty good compared to a lot of things. Shields aren't as helpful to engineers as they are to other classes, so if you don't like dual wielding I'd go twohanded. If you're gonna pick just one set to wear cause it looks nice, like most people seem to do, Mondon's is probably a little more useful than Outercore. But the set benefits aren't great so you can always substitute some other piece if you find something better.

I admit I didn't read all of it. But I assumed since I'm using quietus ember quake would be my goto only cause of the focus bonus. With the first build you linked would that mean I would get some regular attacks in instead of spamming ember quake?

Anyway, Quietus is fine, but there are some better options if you wish. Once you unlock Emberquake, yeah, it's the main thing to spam. You may use some autoattacks as needed to build charge if Charge ****/Dynamo Field aren't doing the job in a given situation.

Actually, on the subject of charge, Onslaught is quite good at building it as well. Potentially giving you a full bar in one cast, which is something Dynamo Field can never do.

From the Mondon's set, the parts you will want to replace most would be the belt, necklace, and rings. Herearesomealternativeitems. Mondon's Mantle can eventually be replaced with an upgraded version. You might even want to use Outercore gloves for the fire/electric damage or Outercore pants for the speed bonus.

As you go through elite, you'll want to farm Grell a bit for some of his eyes, and always be on the lookout for items with bonus HP. There are several mid-level engineer uniques with good damage reduction too.